Adjusted for inflation SH movies in the top 100:
TDK-$583 million
Spider-Man-$546 million
Batman-$494 million
Spider-Man 2-$472 million
Superman-$450 million
Spider-Man 3-$384 million
Spidey and Bats are the top 2 there. Even a bad Spidey movie made it....which no other character can claim. That says something about the character.
One could make the case that no "Batman" movie has really blown up like that....it's really been "Joker" movies. I'm not 100% convinced the Batman character is the selling point. I would think the next Batman movie would break $300 million with no problem, but I also wouldn't be shocked if it missed $400 million.
GWTW is legit to me. It was a cultural phenomenon for decades and is still a pretty big deal today. It got multiple releases because of demand. No one was forced to go see it again or all the other movies would have had multiple re-releases too. And it actually set the TV ratings record when it was first shown on TV in the 70s. In the 80s it was chosen as the first movie to be shown on Ted Turner's brand new network called TNT and he later did the same thing when he started TCM. A 70th anniversary special edition was released last year....so it's still going strong today.
Avatar is awesome, but it's not really in the same class as GWTW culturally. Anyone want to predict a 70th anniversary edition for Avatar?